


Bonding

by TopHat



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-08 22:46:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18904207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TopHat/pseuds/TopHat





	Bonding

When the garage door started slowly rolling open Riley froze like a deer in the headlights, elbow deep in an eviscerated deer in the headlights. She wasn’t using Jacob’s tools (this time), she wasn’t working on a pet from the neighborhood (people had started locking up their animals after dark), and she wasn’t skipping school (Jacob was very strict about that). She’d remembered to put down a tarp to catch the blood and gore, hadn’t popped the intestine, and had dressed sensibly in....

A blue dress and a white apron.

_Fiddlesticks._

The car turned off, its gentle rumble replaced with the steady _tick tick tick_ of a cooling engine.

Then the driver-side door opened up and Riley’s stomach fell through the floor.

“Well well well, what do we have here?” Riley’s lips twitched up in a reflexive grin. Jacob needled people less when they did what he wanted, and most of the time he wanted people to smile. He was in his ‘meeting people’ outfit, a button-up shirt and slacks, and Riley felt her sit up just a little straighter.

“Uh- Not much!” _Fiddlesticks._ A useless word. She’d hear about at the end of the week, the review session on Saturdays where Jacob decided on whether or not he’d send her back to the social workers. At first it hadn’t been hard to earn the Good Girl Grade, but over time the number of points she had to get to be a Good Girl had moved up and up and up. And that was fair! Life was improvement, and Jacob didn’t have to take care of her. Worse people had taken care of kids, and if Jacob was going to spend time and money on her she should pay him back. Fair and square.

He walked up to the edge of the tarp, an inquisitive expression on his face. “Really? It doesn’t look like not much.”

Riley smiled a little wider, shrugging helplessly. Honesty was the best policy. Jacob would always find out if she was lying, and that meant double the penalties. “You caught me right at the end. I’ve already taken out the digestive tract, the respiratory system, the exterior sensory organs, and I was going to start working on getting to the sinuses—”

Jacob waved his hand dismissively and Riley snapped her jaw shut. “I was wondering how you got that big ol’ dear into our garage, actually.”

Riley blinked.

Really?

Jacob raised an eyebrow and Riley started talking again. “I mean, that part wasn’t hard. I had some hormones from a doe I caught a few weeks back, grew a culture from it, and painted a trail from the edge of the woods to our backyard. Once it was there it started grazing on the grass I’d sprayed with a muscle relaxant, and after that I hooked it up the ATV and—"

Jacob frowned. _Gosh-Dangit_. “You’re not supposed to drive the four-wheeler unsupervised.”

“I wasn’t unsupervised! I had the Siberian with me!” Riley jabbed a finger at the white tiger plushie she’d left on Jacob’s carving bench. Red droplets sprinkled off her hand, and Riley forced her eyes to stay on Jacob, to not track the path of the spray, forced herself to not try to count them and see how many chore points she would lose for being messy.

Jacob snorted, lips twisting up in a tiny smirk, and Riley relaxed fractionally. Jacob loved it when she was cutesy, and if she could make things look like an honest mistake she lost fewer points. Never no points, never forgiveness, but leniency was a win on its own. “That’s a good point Riley. Rule change: no riding the ATV without my supervision. Seem fair?”

Riley jerked her head up and down. “Yup! Absolutely!”

“Good.”

For a long moment they stood still, Jack looking down at her, her looking up at him, trying not to squint through the flood lights.

“Do you want to see something interesting?” he asked.

“Sure.” Riley stood up, then paused, staring down at her clothes.

Jacob clucked his tongue. “Now now, don’t worry about that. Just come over here.”

Riley obeyed, hesitantly, then with a little pep in her step. Jacob walked around to the back of his car, whistling tunelessly, and once Riley had come to a stop beside him opened up the trunk. Something large an oblong lay on top of a layer of garbage bags, wrapped in more cheap, black plastic. Jacob reached down to one end, then paused. He turned towards Riley, a real smile on his face. “You ready?”

Riley nodded.

Jacob pulled the plastic back and Riley saw a corpse. Not a cadaver, not like her subjects, not something peeled apart carefully in order to understood how it worked, a corpse. A dead body, one with a lot of different types of wounds. The orbital socket looked caved in, purple and black and deformed, between dead black lips Riley could see crooked and broken teeth, and slowly-darkening gums where blood was already pooling, and a ragged line of broken tissue ran deep across its throat, one that severed the vocal cords, both the external and superficial carotid arteries, both the internal and external jugular veins—

“Can you tell me what killed him?” Jacob asked, one hand settling on Riley’s shoulder and squeezing lightly.

Riley opened her mouth to answer.

Then she paused.

Then shook her head, swallowing. “There isn’t enough blood around the neck. I don’t think that was what did it.”

The hand grew a little firmer. “But can you tell me what killed him?”

Riley looked at her feet, painfully aware of the pulse in her neck. “No.”

The hand flexed once, then disappeared. “Good girl.”

Jacob pulled out a knife, a little switchblade that Riley had looked up at school and learned was very, very illegal, and cut apart the rest of the plastic. Then Riley could see the rest of the corpse, could the mutilated hands, the tourniquets that would’ve cut off blood flow and kept the corpse alive, see the opened red mess of its chest, an abdominal cavity so deflated that something important must’ve been taken out.

“He died of an overdose. Brain hemorrhage. Wouldn’t know it if you looked at him though. I do good work.” Jacob slapped the corpse’s cheek twice and Riley almost collapsed in relief. A lose/lose test. Jacob liked playing with those, and he always gave her ice cream after she made the right choice.

He turned to her and went down on his knees, the brightest smile on his face, and Riley’s skin grew goose pimples. “I’ve got another job coming up later this week. Do you want to see what Uncle Jack does? Have a little Bring-Your-Daughter-To-Work day?”

Riley swallowed down the rush of sick that came with the thought of cutting open a human and nodded frantically. “Absolutely!”


End file.
